Kids inherit obesity from their parents

Kids of obese parents have higher chances of being overweight, a new study has revealed.

A 20-year study conducted by scientists at Glasgow University took into consideration almost 1,500 families in the west of Scotland and found that 9 per cent of children of normal-weight parents were obese, compared with 24 per cent of children whose parents were overweight or obese themselves.

Among women, 17 per cent of mothers were obese, but that figure increased to 20 per cent among daughters, a far greater proportion than among fathers and sons or mothers and sons.

The researchers asserted that although genetic factors also have a role to play in obesity, the gender differences were likely to be because of how children were fed.

Women were more likely to have a similar weight to their mother, and experts believe that this could be due to mothers passing on their cooking skills and food choices to their daughters but not their sons.

"It's not the entire population that have got bigger over the last 20 years, but those who were overweight seem to have got even bigger. Within these families, of the people whose parents were big, the children are now even bigger," the Scotsman quoted Dr Jennifer Logue, a clinical lecturer in biochemistry and metabolic medicine at Glasgow University as saying.

"There was a stronger relationship between daughters and their mothers' weight than among other groups of relatives.

"For everyone, if your parents are big, you're going to be big, and the bigger families are having bigger children. But daughters seem to inherit more from their mother," she added.

The study has been recently published in European Journal Of Epidemiology.